Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Heavenly Truths (False Alarm! part ix)

Episode Date: August 7, 2018

A postmodern prehistory of post-truth and an alternative history of the Civil War. Our exploration of the Nazi Supernatural concludes with Werewolves and Mass Suicide. Plus: another installment in our False Alarm! fairy tale, the little boy from part one (now designing clothes for the Emperor) gets a surprise visit from a little girl in a red coat! 2018 is not the first time truth, fiction and lies have merged together. In the 1850s people turned to the the dead for answers. In the 1930’s, Hitler and the Nazis tried to remake the world using magic and pseudoscience. In phase two of False Alarm! we’re going to bounce between the second half of the 19th century, the interwar years and the present to find out if we are doomed for a repeat?

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called Heavenly Truth. woe deceitful shine deceitful flow there's nothing true but heaven there's nothing true but heaven very nice and and what's that alexander stevens and he sang these words The first verse of a poem by Thomas More When he woke up in his jail cell At Fort Warren in Boston On the morning of June 5th, 1865 Well, at least that's what he wrote in his diary Who is Alexander Stevens?

He was the vice president of the Confederacy. Now, he was arrested two days before the war officially ended, on May 11th, 1865, which means this very important diary entry from June 5th was written not even a month after the fighting stopped. And what's so important about this diary entry? It is the cornerstone of one of America's greatest lies. The alternative history of the Civil War. Before the war, Alexander Stevens spent about a decade in the House of Representatives, representing Georgia and the South. And he was very open and public about his views on secession.

He thought it was foolish and unnecessary for the South to leave the Union. Why? Because the North, he argued, would eventually come to its senses on the slavery issue. How do you mean? For example, in 1852, a representative from Massachusetts took the floor of the House and made the case that the South would ultimately be compelled to yield on the slavery issue. Because it was impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics just as it was in physics or mechanics. Okay. The representative from Massachusetts made the case that the South was at war with a principle founded in nature, the principle of the equality of men. then Alexander Stevens takes the floor and replies that it is actually the North that will ultimately fail. Because the North is the one at war with the fundamental law of nature.

The North is attempting to make things equal, which the creator had made unequal. So there was just no arguing the evils of slavery with this guy? Nope. In fact, he talked about this anecdote in his most famous speech, a speech he gave on March 21st, 1861, a speech where he laid out the fundamentals of the Constitution of the Confederacy. Our new government's cornerstone, he wrote, rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. Our new government is the first in the history of the world based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

He sounds like Hitler. What's alternative about this? Well, everything I just told you comes from a speech he gave before the war. His diary entry from June 5th, 1865 is where he lays out the alternative vision. The slavery question had but little influence with the masses. This is actually what he wrote. Many, even of the large slaveholders, to my personal knowledge, were willing from the first years of the war to give up that institution for peace on recognition of the doctrine of ultimate sovereignty of the separate states. The view of the great math was that with the recognition of the principle of state sovereignty as a basis of adjustment, the future might well be left to take care of itself. The states would soon assume relations to each other in such political bonds So he's saying that slavery wasn't the cause of the war, but that it states rights.

Yep. And he wrote this a month after the Civil War was over. Yep. The facts are these as I understand them, he wrote this a month after the Civil War was over. Yep. The facts are these as I understand them, he wrote. No people on Earth were ever more united, earnest, resolved to resist to the last extremity than the Southern people. They were ready to sacrifice property, life, everything for the cause, which was then simply the right of self-government. Wow. But what about his famous speech about how slavery was this natural law?

Fake news. Come on. That didn't exist back then. This is what he wrote in his diary entry about his famous cornerstone speech. As for my Savannah speech, about which so much has been said and in regard to which I am represented as setting forth slavery as the cornerstone of the Confederacy, it is proper for me to state that that speech was extemporaneous. The reporter's notes, which were very imperfect, were hastily corrected by me and were published without further revision and with several glaring errors. Once upon a time, there was a little girl determined to avenge the death of her older brother who was killed and eaten by a wolf.

But this little girl came from a part of the world where vengeance was an activity reserved for menfolk. And so when she told her father and two other brothers about her vow, they told her to get back to her sewing. We will take care of that big bad wolf, they said with bravado. But these men were not brave. They were nothing but talk. At the funeral, one of her brothers shot an AR-15 in the air. The others swung double-fired nunchucks. But that was it. They never even ventured into the forest. A couple of days after the funeral, the little girl learned why. When a man from the government paid the family a visit and her father a princely sum.

You see, in order to keep the shepherds from obliterating the wolves of the forest, the government paid out for every sheep killed. Even though this family claimed the life of their son was equal the worth of three sheep, not one, their demands were met. Their request was fulfilled. When the little girl confronted her father over this gross mistake, she was told that her brother was in truth a disgrace, with his selfish desires and demands for more. But what he'd failed in life was provided in death. Later that evening, as her father and brothers were busy installing the brand new hydrotherapy jacuzzi in the backyard,

the little girl snuck off into the forest. Busy installing the brand new hydrotherapy jacuzzi in the backyard, the little girl snuck off into the forest. She took nothing with her but a basket filled with scones and a small steel dagger with which she planned to fulfill her oath and a bright red cloak to keep her warm in the night. Designing clothes for an emperor who's nude isn't hard to do, but the work is ridiculous. But it's not the endless variations on nothing that drives our little boy, whose family connections got him the job

as the emperor's head tailor, to despair. It is the apprentices. One of his primary responsibilities is hiring assistants for his shop. Assistants who all strangely take off after a mandatory solo interview with the boss. The piles of applications are constant distractions, but the emperor insists that the little boy keep looking for that perfect fit. And then, one day, he finds her. A girl who's just arrived from the east, ready to prove herself, ready to please. As soon as he sees her, his head starts to spin.

It's almost as if the air has suddenly gone thin. And so he says, yes. Of course, the boss wants to meet her right straight away. And as much as our little boy tries to faint and delay, the emperor won't have it. He demands an audience in his chambers post-haste. And so the little girl gathers up some invisible fabric samples and heads up the tower stairs. But not before first adjusting her faded red hood. And then the little boy does something that he's never done before. He slips off his shoes and follows the girl silently up the stairs all the way to the now closed door, and then he drops to his knees and plants his face on the keyhole.

What big eyes you have, the girl says to the emperor, who's reclining in his favorite chair. All the better to see you with, my dear, the emperor shares. The girl takes a step closer. What big hands you have, all the better too. Ah, fuck it, he snarls, and with that he sheds his birthday suit. The emperor's not naked. He's a wolf who wears the skin of a man. But you knew that, and so did the girl,

who's never forgotten the oath she declared. But a small steel dagger's no match for sharp teeth, nor can a childish oath trump the law of the beasts. You can look it up for yourself, but I'm telling you the truth. The crush of bones and the splitting of kin, that's how this story ends. Okay, perhaps if the little boy had kicked open the door or raised the alarm, things could have been different. But that's asking a lot, because he wasn't just scared, he was also complicit. One of the things I posted on Facebook in Russian after the elections when I was in a state of despair was that I felt like my kitchen in New Haven, our family's kitchen, had become like a Soviet kitchen, you know, in the 1970s or the 1980s. Suddenly, you know, friends are coming by, everyone's gathering in the kitchen, opening bottles of vodka, crying, you know, asking, you know,

whose fault is this, you know, and what can we do? Marcy Shore is a professor at Yale University and an Eastern European scholar. She's been critically engaged with political lies and post-truths for most of her adult life. She uses the two eternal Russian questions, who is to blame and what is to be done, to frame an essay for the website Eurozyme on the prehistory of post-truth, both East and West. In her essay, she provides a very compelling answer to the first question, who is to blame? She says it's postmodernism. So postmodernism, as a kind of philosophical move,

develops precisely as an antidote to totalitarianism, as an antidote to absolutized thinking, as an attempt to think through not just the political mistakes, but also the intellectual mistakes, you know, of the 19th, especially the late 19th and the 20th century, and find a way that those moves could be resisted in the future. One of postmodernism's greatest thinkers, Jacques Derrida, laid out a number of strategies in his writings as to how this resistance could and should work. For Derrida, it was all about resisting totalitarianism.

And you look at the way truth claims are never as absolute as they seem. That really these seemingly pure binaries of good and evil and truth and lies can almost always be taken apart. I mean, Derrida uses the word deconstruction. Nothing is ever pure. Meaning is never self-identical to itself. Meaning is always in flux.

It's fluid. Things never mean the same thing at all different places in the same time. And they never mean exactly the same thing that they're going to mean in the future or they have meant in the past. Because of this element of freedom and creativity and play and precisely our agency in creating the world and creating meaning is a kind of de-totalitarianizing mechanism. And that was not a nihilistic move from Derrida's perspective. That was an affirmation of human freedom and human creativity. Okay. Now, you write in your essay that we can draw a straight line from Derrida to Putin.

So does that mean then that these resistance moves like only work in theory or did Derrida have like an actual blind spot? I mean I think intellectually we could draw a line from Derrida to Putin but I would not say Derrida personally should be blamed. And maybe one way to get at this is to look at how Hannah Arendt explains the difference between what she calls old-fashioned lies and the modern totalitarian lie. She has this idea that the old-fashioned lie, it was like a tear in the fabric of reality. And the careful observer could still spot the place where reality had been torn and sewn back together. The old-fashioned political lie was limited in a certain way. You know, it was directed at something specific for a specific person. You know, the leader who claims not to have slept

with the woman he actually did sleep with, or the leader who claims not to have known about the terrible things his subordinates were doing, but of course did, that it was somehow confined and it didn't undermine the whole fabric of reality as such. And then Arendt says what happened in the 20th century that was different, what happened under totalitarianism, is that you suddenly have lies that are a total reconstruction of reality in such a way as to be seamless. So there's no more, there's no more seem for the careful observer to perceive. And then what we kind of have in Putin's Russia, and I think Peter Pomerantsev was the first person who articulated this so well in a book called Nothing is True and Everything

is Possible. And he was talking about a kind of, you know, postmodern neo-totalitarianism, although he doesn't use this term, in which you have one alternative reality, seamless, you know, it's stripped away, and then there's another alternative reality, and that's stripped away, and then there's just another alternative reality. And people actually lose faith in the accept that there is no such thing as absolute truth. It's all a matter of perspective. And you kind of give up. You kind of give up on thinking that something can be stripped away and something real can be found. But the question of responsibility is key. Because for Derrida, it turns out that, you know, a philosophy that was supposed to restore our freedom and responsibility, you know, in fact, became a way of pulling out the ground from under our feet.

And that Arendt does have a name for it. She calls it Bodenlosigkeit. You know, she says when there's no agreement about empirical reality, there's nowhere to stand. Without an agreement on empirical reality, you don't have a starting point for any kind of communication. Yeah, but when you put it like that, I just feel dumb about all the time I spent reading Derrida and Baudrillard and all the other French dudes. I mean, she flat out is warning us about the vulnerabilities of truth. Yes. No, no. I absolutely feel that way, too. No, after 2014, after the beginning of the war in the Donbass, I started assigning truth and politics in all my seminars.

After our catastrophic elections in the States, I changed all my previous teaching plans and decided we're going to return to the classics of totalitarianism. We're all going to read origins of totalitarianism because we have to go back to some kind of grounding point and understand what totalitarianism was in the 20th century and then try to understand what this new kind of postmodern version might be. So part of your answer to the second eternal Russian question, what is to be done, is obviously to read more Hannah Arendt. But you write that we also might find a real solution to the mess we're in by turning to the East, specifically dissident Eastern European philosophy. What is it exactly that this way of thinking or mode of being has to offer us?

I mean, the reason why I had been thinking about this so much is when I first started working on Eastern Europe as a student in the 1990s, I was interested in the political philosophy of the dissidents in Czechoslovakia. I mean, and they very explicitly reject this postmodern turn. And that was one of the things I've been interested in for years, before all this happened with Putin and Trump and post-truth, like how this same philosophical tradition of Hegel and Heidegger confronting Husserl, how that takes a very different turn in Western Europe and especially France after 1968 from the direction

it takes in Eastern Europe, where truth becomes the thing that you hold on to. The first word I ever learned in Czech, which was the first Slavic language I learned, was pravda, which means truth. I was talking to then former dissidents and the first thing that struck me was that they kept talking about truth as if it were something solid and tangible, as if it were something like your keys. You could kind of hold on to it and put it in your pocket. And that was very striking to me because it was a word I had never particularly reflected on in English, you know, and it became central to my understanding the philosophy of dissent in Czechoslovakia. You know, and over the years as these ideas percolated,

you know, I came to see why in a regime that was based on lies it became so important to insist that there was such a thing as truth. That's a recording the Nazis made when they feared they were going to lose the war. It was broadcast throughout Germany on Radio Werewolf. The radio station Goebbels set up for these special forces that would wage guerrilla war on the Allied and Russian forces. The Nazi Werewolves. That's not some random thing they got from a comic book they were reading. That's a tradition, a paramilitary and folkloric tradition. They purposely didn't even use the play on words, which is in German, W-E-H-R, like Wehrmacht stands for defense. So you'd see like the twenties group called themselves the Wehrwolf,

but not with W E R. They use W E H R because they meant it as a kind of paramilitary force. But when Himmler and Hitler and Goebbels come up with theirs in late 44, they throw out the H it's just werewolf. Like the old Harry turns into a monster by night, because they clearly wanted to be as folkloric and fantastical as possible. The werewolf is this kind of tragic hero, a kind of oerger manic, going back to Odin, you know, the berserkers who would put on these animal skins. They're masculine, they're Aryan, they're Nordic, they roam the forests, can't quite control what they do, but they mean well. In some parts of Germany, they're

good creatures who help wayward travelers. In others, unfortunately, if they can't control it, they might attack someone, but they're not pestilent, evil monsters out to destroy your race and your civilization. The werewolf emerges in the final act of the Nazi tragedy. But as Eric Kurlander points out in his book, Hitler's Monsters, the werewolf was part of the Nazi supernatural from the beginning. A number of the Nazi leaders were obsessed with Der Werewolf, a book that was published in 1910, a book set during the Thirty Years' War, Europe's last epic religious confrontation. Good Protestant peasants whose families were

killed by the Catholics went into the woods and became like werewolves and would come out at night and attack these evil, you know, Catholics from the Counter-Reformation trying to destroy their blood and soil communities. This book sells hundreds of thousands of copies. A bunch of paramilitary groups get together in the 20s and call themselves the werewolves. And Himmler is like fascinated by them. Goebbels loves it. He takes the guy's grave, the guy who wrote it, and moves it to Germany, and there's big articles on this. Hitler's East European headquarters in 43 is called the werewolf. He also has a wolf slayer, by the way.

He loved werewolves. They all did. The Nazi werewolves failed to win a single victory in reality. But as fantasy, the werewolf was one of Goebbels' greatest creations. There weren't tens of thousands of highly trained special forces werewolves. There were perhaps a few thousand, many of them young boys, who had no real military training and posed no real threat to anyone. But the reason we still talk about it is they managed to create a real sense of paranoia and fear that the werewolves are out there and they're going to get you.

If you're German and you're not defending the Reich, but considering surrendering, we're going to kill you in the dead of night. And God forbid you're a Slavic partisan or communist, we're going to kill you. And we're all over and you don't know where we are. It was scary enough that even Eisenhower, who was a very sober leader, did worry that there were a bunch of werewolves somewhere, hidden away, ready to come storming down the mountain. If you were already susceptible to this kind of thinking, like many Germans had been, you could imagine how scary it was.

The Nazi werewolf scared thousands and thousands of Germans to death. Everybody knows about Hitler killing himself in the last days of the war in the bunker. And it's also quite well known that many of the big, big Nazi party leaders and also military leaders killed themselves in the last weeks and days of the war. But as it comes to the normal people, the ordinary people, this was never a subject in German history, never a subject in our way of dealing with our history. But that's a really interesting phenomenon I found out because almost any family has someone who has known someone who killed himself. This is Florian Hubert, author of the book

Kindesprich mehr, dass du dich erstriegst, or Child, promise me that you will shoot yourself. Dutch radio producer Julie Bluzet spoke with him for her Dutch-language VPRO podcast, Deis Reist. Tens of thousands of Germans killed themselves in the mass suicide epidemic that took place at the end of the Second World War, all within a matter of just a few weeks. People hung themselves from the

trees in Berlin's public parks, shot themselves if they had a gun, or took cyanide pills. But some survived. Well, I always had difficulties with my hand. The nerves were severed. Nobody even knew how to cut your wrists. You shouldn't cut the wrists in this way, but like this. No one knew how, because no one had wanted to cut the wrists. This is Brigitte Rosso. She's 83 years old now and lives in Demin, a small town two hours north of Berlin.

She still lives in the same house her parents bought before the war. And there she'd spent, by her own account, a wonderful, calm, even peaceful childhood. Until April 30th of 1945, when she was 10 years old. The German soldiers left Deming that day and literally burned the bridges behind them. This meant that both the approaching Red Army, on its way to Berlin, and the Demingers themselves found themselves trapped in this tiny town. They should never have blown up the bridges. I don't know. Then nothing would have happened. They would have just marched through here.

But they couldn't keep going. And that's why all of that happened over here, right? That's at least what I imagine. At first, Brigitte's mother simply planned to take Brigitte, her older brother and her younger sister, leave the house and hide out in the fields in between Demin and the rivers, to find a safe place where they could wait till the Russians had come and left town again. But after a night of hiding out in the fields, watching as a big part of the city went up in flames, Brigitte and her family ended up at a farm where the two young farmer girls had a very different plan.

And there, there were two young girls who had been part of the band of German maidens, the Nazi youth group. They had grown up with Hitler and they had resolved before they would surrender to the Russians to kill themselves. The real question I was asking myself is, why did they do that? Why did people of any kind of society kind of get the idea of now the world is over, now we got to kill ourselves? Of course, there are many reasons, shame and guilt for one, about what the Germans had done. But there was also fear, an intense fear of what was to come. Right from the beginning of the campaign in the East, which began in June 1941, German propaganda did everything to kind of demonize the Soviet people as a whole. They were described like Russian murderer gangs, you know.

Every Russian was a potential murderer for them. And that's what they tried to put into people's mind. And one must say they were quite successful with that. As it became clear that the Soviet and Allied forces were gaining the upper hand, the Nazis wanted to ensure that the German population wouldn't give up, would keep fighting to the end. Operation Werewolf formed part of this propaganda effort, but so did horrific tales about what the Russians would do once they got their hands on German civilians. Now, some of those stories were true. It's well known, for example, that hundreds of thousands of women in Germany were raped by Soviet soldiers.

And that also happened in Brigitte's hometown of Demin. But these stories were also exaggerated, like in the famous case of the Nemersdorf massacre. The Nemersdorf story took place in the end of 1944, when the Russians kind of made an attack onto German soil. That was the first time when the russians came over the frontier they were pushed back by the german soldiers and they found a village called nemastov where they had lots of dead people and joseph goebbels propaganda minister immediately understood the chance he had gotten there and he sent a camera team there and had them make films about the dead bodies, groups of pictures which were shown in German newspapers, shown in the Wochenschau movie theaters, trying to prove

what they always had said then. The Russians were a terrible bunch of murderers and killers who preferredly killed civilians, women, old people and children. So they tried to take this chance to strengthen the will of the Germans to fight until the last minute. Because otherwise the future will be absolutely black for us. If we don't fight the Russians now, if not anyone, each one of us takes a gun and fires it against any Russian which he can see. So we're going to be lost. We're going to be massacred. That last line of the propaganda news report

states that Nemersdorf lit a fanatical hate among the German soldiers. But in reality, these movies about raped women and slave children and tortured men did not inspire people to fight. I know my mom went to the movie theater and that's where they showed what the Russians would do to the Germans. I think my mother would never have considered taking her life. But when you end up in a situation like that... It's a horrific fact that many of those who died during this suicide epidemic hadn't actually killed themselves.

They were children, killed by their own parents, out of the insane belief that such a death was somehow better than whatever the Soviets had in store for them. And then we ended up in the hayloft with them. That's where they took out razors and divided them among us. We didn't even have those. Well, my cousin was also there. She lived up here. And then my other cousin, he was lying there for dead already. And my brother, he had struggled with his

woman. He wanted to get to the ladder. He wanted to get out. He was three years older. He was 13. He wanted out of there. He wanted down. And the women still cut him. But it wasn't that bad what he had. And my mother cut my sister. And then she came to me. And I probably didn't hold still because I wanted to live. I didn't want to die. I thought, now everything has come to an end,

and I just wanted to live. And my brother must have thought the same. Or otherwise he wouldn't have jumped down. And when my mother saw that my brother was down there, then she took us. She took my sister and told me to come over. And then we went down and then they bandaged us up. The Russians. There were many Soviet soldiers who kind of committed crimes. Like in any place in Germany, we have these stories of women being raped and civilians being killed. But also we must see that the Soviet soldiers were the first ones to witness this mass suicide,

and they were completely shocked. And they tried to help many of them to keep them from killing themselves, from killing their children. The Russian then came over and asked my mother, why did she do that? In any case, he wanted to shoot her. Because she wanted to take her life and that of her children. They couldn't understand that. He raised a pistol. And then my brother came over, took both of us, put himself in the middle and asked the soldier to shoot him. And then the Russian looked at him, and then he patted him on the head.

You're a good boy. That's how he got out. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Heavenly Truth. This episode was produced by me, Benjamin Walker, and Andrew Calloway. It featured TOE's special correspondent Chris, Marcy Shore, Eric Kuhlander, Florian Uberg, Brigitte Rosso, and Julie Bluzet. You can find a link to Eric Kuhlander's book and Marcy Shore's essay on the TOE site, and a link to Julie'suhlander's book and Marcy Short's essay on the TOE site, and a link to Julie's podcast, Tieskes. The next season, of which the mass suicide story is part of,

will air on Dutch radio around mid-November. But if you understand Dutch, well, season one is already available. Also available in German is Florian Huber's book, Child, Promise Me That You Will Shoot Yourself. Julie thanks Madeline de Kaiser for performing the translation and Martin Farkas for putting her in touch with Brigitte. The Theory of Everything is a founding member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's best podcasts.

Find them all at radiotopia.fm. Radiotopia from PRX.